Journal of Social Sciences
Original Research Paper
CAUSAL CONSTRUCTIONS WITH AN ADJECTIVE IN
GERMAN AND FRENCH: TYPOLOGICAL AND
PEDAGOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Sabine De Knop
Department of Germanic Languages, Université Saint-Louis, Brussels, Belgium
Article history
Received: 30-03-2015
Revised: 19-05-2015
Accepted: 13-08-2015
Email: [email protected]
Abstract: The study explores the variety of causal constructions with an
adjective in French and German, as they are realized in French Pierre est
rouge de colère (‘Peter is red with anger’), German Maria ist gelb vor
Eifersucht (‘Maria is yellow with jealousy’), French Il est fou d’amour (lit.
‘He is crazy of love’), or French Anne est morte de faim (lit. ‘Anne is dead
of hunger’). First, the different elements of the construction are described in
detail in the framework of Goldberg’s Construction Grammar model (1995
and 2006) and of different phraseological studies (Burger, 2007;
Dobrovol’skij, 2011; Donalies, 2009; Fleischer, 1997; Gries, 2008). One
and the same syntactic structure can convey different meanings (also a noncausal meaning) with different degrees of idiomaticity. In a contrastive
approach, the study further highlights the typological differences in the
causal construction between the Germanic language German and the
Romance language French. These differences can lead to difficulties for
French-speaking learners of German. The study proposes some teaching
strategies to facilitate the learning of such causal constructions with an
adjective. We advocate a teaching methodology which privileges holistic
sequences or so-called ‘chunks’ (Handwerker, 2008) and which further
focuses on the typological differences in the lexicalization patterns (e.g.
different prepositions in German, different color terms,…), but also on
conceptual metaphor and metonymy (Barcelona, 2001; Lakoff and Johnson,
1980; Niemeier, 1998). This helps foreign learners to ‘rethink for speaking’
(Ellis and Cadierno, 2009: 123) in the foreign language.
Keywords: Causal Construction, Construction with Adjective, Variation,
Idiomaticity Degree, Contrastive Study, German, French, Typological
Differences, Pedagogical Issues, Chunks, Metaphor and Metonymy
Introduction
The present contrastive study explores constructions
with an adjective in French and German, as illustrated in
the following examples:
(1) Fr. Pierre est rouge de colère
‘Peter is red with anger’
(2) Germ. Die Hände sind blau vor Kälte
‘The hands are blue from the cold’
(3) Fr. Il est fou d’amour
Lit. ‘He is crazy of love’
= ‘He is very much in love’
(4) Fr. Anne est morte de faim
Lit. ‘Anne is dead of hunger’
= ‘Anne is very hungry’.
This short list of examples makes clear that one and
the same syntactic structure, namely [ADJECTIVE
PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE], can convey different
meanings with different degrees of idiomaticity. The first
examples in the list (1 and 2) can be understood literally,
they express causality, whereas examples (3) and (4) are
idiomatic expressions which convey the meaning of
excessiveness or intensification (Zeschel, 2012). The aim
of this paper is to explore and describe this variety. Because this structure is entrenched in French and German1
and its meaning is sometimes non-compositional, it can
be defined as a construction in the sense of Construction
Grammar. That is why the description of the examples
will be based on the framework of Goldberg’s Construction Grammar model (1995 and 2006). As the examples
© 2015 Sabine De Knop. This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 3.0 license.
Sabine De Knop / Journal of Social Sciences 2015, 11 (3): 289.303
DOI: 10.3844/jssp.2015.289.303
the Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache
(DWDS, http://www.dwds.de/), Section 2 will describe
the syntactic and semantic variation of the structure
under study, thereby defining the properties of the adjectives in the construction. This section will also deal with
issues related to the phraseological status of the construction and further with the meaning the construction
can convey. Section 3 will examine the typological differences between French and German. It will present two
surveys conducted with French-speaking and German
natives with the aim of defining the favorite lexicalization patterns for the expression of excessiveness in both
languages. As the typological differences can be problematic for French-speaking learners of German, the pedagogical challenges related to these differences and the
variation will be analyzed in more detail in Section 4.
The following Section 5 will discuss some teaching
strategies intended to facilitate the learning of the construction. Finally, Section 6 will summarize the findings
and propose some perspectives.
under study have a phraseological meaning and different
degrees of idiomaticity, we will also refer to phraseology
studies (Burger, 2007; Dobrovol’skij, 2011; Donalies,
2009; Fleischer, 1997; Gries, 2008; Wulff, 2012) to
explore the examples’ specificities.
The variety of constructions is even larger if one
takes a contrastive perspective and compares the realization of the same syntactic structure across languages.
Depending on the language, different adjectives or prepositions will be selected in the same causal construction. For instance, for the same emotion of envy or jealousy, Germans use the color adjective gelb (‘yellow’),
whereas French speakers will select the color adjective
vert (‘green’). Therefore, the present study will also
address typological issues related to the favorite lexicalization patterns (Talmy, 2000) in French vs. German and
it will extend the analysis to alternative ways of expressing causality or excessiveness, for instance with compounds in German. E.g. the French example (4) Anne est
morte de faim (lit. ‘Anne is dead of hunger’ = ‘Anne is
very hungry’) does not have a one-to-one corresponding
causal structure in German, but either a compound for the
same expression of excessiveness, e.g. Riesenhunger (lit.
‘giant hunger’), or a causal construction with a verb Anne
stirbt vor Hunger (lit. ‘Anne dies of hunger’). In order to
investigate such typological differences between the Romance language French and the Germanic language German, some surveys were conducted with German and
French-speaking natives which are presented in Section 3.
The semantic variation for one and the same construction which oscillates between literal and non-literal meaning, or between more or less idiomatic meaning and the
selection of favorite lexicalization patterns constitute pedagogical challenges for French-speaking learners of German.
There are several issues in the learning process due to the
“typological distance” (Athanasopoulos, 2009: 93) between
German and French. Not only do learners of German have
to determine whether the syntactic structure expresses a
literal or an idiomatic meaning, a more or less causal meaning, but they also have to recognize that German uses different structures to express the same meaning as in French.
In the last section of this article, we will provide
some teaching strategies to facilitate the learning of
the causal constructions with an adjective in all its
facets. We will advocate a teaching methodology
which privileges holistic sequences or so-called
‘chunks’ (Handwerker, 2008) and which further focuses on the typological differences in the lexicalization patterns (e.g. several prepositions in German,
different color terms, divergent structures), but also
on conceptual metaphor and metonymy (Barcelona,
2001; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Niemeier, 1998).
The paper is structured as follows: Starting with examples
from
the
Sketchengine
corpora
(http://the.SketchEngine.co.uk)2 and the core corpora of
Syntactic and Semantic Variation
The examples under study have the abstract syntactic structure [ADJECTIVE PREPOSITIONAL
PHRASE], they are constructions in Goldberg’s sense
(1995 and 2006), i.e. form-meaning pairs which are
entrenched both in German and French. They are often realized in a syntactic structure with a copula verb
which is most of the time être in French or sein in
German (‘to be’). But other copula verbs are possible,
as exemplified in the following example with French
devenir ‘to become’:
(5) Fr. […] des fois, j’en deviens vert de colère.
(SketchEngine, 12930)3
Lit. ‘[…] sometimes I become green with anger’.
As the above examples (1)-(4) illustrate, the adjective
in this construction is often a color adjective, but other
non-scalar adjectives can also be used, e.g. Fr. fou
‘crazy’, mort ‘dead’, malade ‘ill’, Germ. blind ‘blind’,
(3) Fr. Il est fou d’amour
Lit. ‘He is crazy of love’
(4) Fr. Anne est morte de faim
Lit. ‘Anne is dead of hunger’
= ‘Anne is very hungry’
(6) Fr. Elle était malade d’amour
Lit. ‘She was ill/sick of love’
(7) Germ. Sie ist blind vor Liebe
Lit. ‘She is blind of love’.
The adjective expresses the effect triggered by or resulting from the specific cause expressed by the following prepositional group. It is often an emotion, as illu290
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DOI: 10.3844/jssp.2015.289.303
German corpus we found 26 instantiations as against
114 examples in the French corpus. As we realize, the
number of hits of the specific construction with a color
term is rather low, i.e. less than 1 per million. Goldberg
does not further define what she means with ‘sufficient
frequency’, but since more than 100 examples could be
found in the French corpus, we expect the structure to
be recurrent and therefore entrenched. Moreover the
analyzed constructions build a “semantic unity” (Gries,
2008: 8) and convey a specific meaning. We will further see in Section 3 that the difference between the
results for German and French is justified by the preferred lexicalization patterns in both languages.
Some examples can be understood in a compositional
or non-compositional way, depending on the meaning
being conveyed, as exemplified by (1):
strated in examples (1)-(3) or (6) and (7), but it can also
be a physical cause, either internal (see example (4)) or
external like in:
(2) Germ. Die Hände sind blau vor Kälte
Lit. ‘The hands are blue from [the] cold’
(8) Fr. Les enfants étaient bleus de froid
Lit. ‘The children were blue from [the] cold’.
At the semantic level the construction can convey
various meanings. In its primary use, it expresses a
causal event with a cause (expressed by the prepositional
group) and an effect (expressed by the adjective). Cause
and effect are connected to each other in the same
construction by a prepositional link (Khoo et al., 2002:
55)4. For instance, in example (2) or (8), the blue effect
results from the cold, or the other way round, the cold is
the cause for the color change. In its basic use the
construction is further characterized by compositionality,
i.e. that the causal meaning resulting from the
concomitant use of the different constituent elements of
the construction is fully predictable. In her (1995) book,
Goldberg considered that constructions have to be noncompositional to have the constructional status:
(1) Fr. Pierre est rouge de colère
‘Peter is red with anger’.
This example can mean that Peter is indeed red in
the face because he got upset about something, in
which case the meaning is compositional and fully
predictable from the abstract construction. The use of
color adjectives is quite common in this type of construction, it refers to a change of color in the face due
to a particular cause. Soriano und Valenzuela (2009:
423) speak of the ‘rise of a body fluid’ to explain the
color change, e.g. in example (1):
According to Construction Grammar, a distinct
construction is defined to exist if one or more
of its properties are not strictly predictable
from knowledge of other constructions existing
in grammar: C is a construction iffdef C is a
form-meaning pair <Fi,Si> such that some aspect of Fi or some aspect of Si is not strictly
predictable from C’s component parts or from
other previously established constructions.
(Goldberg, 1995: 4)
the color refers to a body fluid that intervenes
(or is believed to intervene) in the experience
of the emotion at stake. In the case of anger
the fluid is blood, which rushes to the neck
and face areas when we feel outraged. (Soriano and Valenzuela 2009: 423)
The ‘rise of a body fluid’ can lead to different colors in
the face, like yellow, blue, white, green 6 and so on, e.g.
In her later book (2006) she reconsidered this aspect
and redefined constructions as having to be entrenched
and frequent in use:
(9)
Fr. Elle est verte de peur, morte de trouille!
(SketchEngine, 10573)
Lit. ‘She is green with fear, dead of fright!’
(10) Fr. […] ils étaient tous pâles de terreur et
certains ont commencé à vomir
(SketchEngine, 05302)
Lit. ‘[…] they were all pale with terror and some of
them started to vomit’
(11) Fr. Il était jaune d’indigestion
Lit. ‘He was yellow because of indigestion’
(12) Fr. Il est rose de bonheur
Lit. ‘He is pink of happiness’
(http://www.gazette-besancon.fr/2010/02/23/ jeanlouis-fousseret-je-suis-rose-de-bonheur/).
In addition, patterns are stored as constructions even if they are fully predictable as long
as they occur with sufficient frequency.
(Goldberg, 2006: 5)
The causal structure under study can be considered to
be entrenched as a search in the French and German
corpora of the Sketchengine shows. In February 2012,
examples of the causal structure with a color adjective
were looked for, both in the French corpus frWaC, which
contained 1.628.667.738 tokens and 1.279.937.839
words and in the German corpus deTenTen (with
2.844.839.761 tokens and 2.338.036.362 words). We
started with a search of the causal construction with the
most common color adjectives5 (see Berlin and Kay
1969) white, black, red, green, blue and yellow. In the
The same construction can also be used in a noncompositional way to express an extreme or excessive
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state. This is particularly the case when the construction
is not used literally, but much more in an idiomatic way.
Let us look again at some examples:
can also be understood in a literal way, e.g. in a context
where somebody is so upset that s/he indeed gets a red
face. If the interpretation of the same example is nonliteral, i.e. if at least one lexical element is fixed (see
Gries’ definition of phraseologism 2008: 6) it is
idiomatic in use and following traditional research in
phraseology (Burger, 2007; Dobrovol’skij 2011;
Donalies, 2009; Fleischer, 1997) can be defined as a
phraseologism. As we saw before, a higher degree of
idiomaticity, e.g. with the lexicalized expressions fou de,
mort de, malade de, leads to a greater loss of the causal
meaning. When in use, some of the slots around these
expressions have to be filled (see also Dobrovol’skij,
2011: 114 or Rostila, 2011: 265), namely X and Y in [X
est fou de Y], [X est mort de Y] or [X est malade de Y].
Various elements are possible, e.g. in example (3) Il est
fou d’amour, one could replace the prepositional
complement Y by almost any other complement which
can make somebody ‘crazy’, for instance (3) Il est fou de
pizza (‘of pizza’), de linguistique (‘of linguistics’), de toi
(‘of you’), de son ordinateur (‘of his computer’), to
name just a few. Following Fleischer (1997: 130), who
proposes the term Phraseoschablone (literally: ‘phraseopattern’) for such expressions, Dobrovol’skij (2011: 114)
suggests the term phraseo-construction. This is the term
we will use for this type of examples.
To summarize, the syntactic structure [ADJECTIVE
PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE] is polysemous, the
instantiations of this structure are different realizations of
the same schematic construction, they are linked to each
other by inheritance links (Goldberg, 1995). We will
postulate that the prototypical realization of this
construction is compositional and expresses the literal
meaning of causality, e.g.:
(1) Fr. Pierre est rouge de colère
Lit. ‘Peter is red with anger’
(3) Fr. Il est fou d’amour
Lit. ‘He is crazy of love’
(4) Fr. Anne est morte de faim
Lit. ‘Anne is dead of hunger’
= ‘Anne is very hungry’
(6) Fr. Elle était malade d’amour
Lit. ‘She was ill/sick of love’
(7) Germ. Sie ist blind vor Liebe
Lit. ‘She is blind of love’
(9) Fr. Elle est verte de peur, morte de trouille!
(SketchEngine, 10573)
Lit. ‘She is green with fear, dead of fright!’
In the examples, the subject is not ‘really’ red (1),
crazy (3), dead (4), ill (6), blind (7) or green (9). Semantically, these examples do not express causality (even if
primarily they did), but much more a state of excessiveness or exaggeration. Examples (1) or (9) can convey the
literal meaning of a color change in the face, but more
than that, they can also refer to a specific state, namely a
state of anger in example (1), or of great fear in (9). In
this case, the color of the face is the metonymical expression for this state and the underlying metonymy is
COLOR OF THE FACE FOR PHYSICAL STATE.
Non-color adjectives are also possible in the construction, more specifically resultative or telic adjectives
(dead, crazy, ill, blind). Of course, the instantiations [X
est mort de Y] (see example 4) or [X est fou de Y] in
example (3) were originally motivated by causality, i.e.
‘Y (almost) provokes the death/the craziness of X’. The
motivation faded with the lexicalization process and
some slots can be filled rather freely, e.g. Fr. Il est mort
de faim/de soif/de peur/de fatigue and so on, lit. ‘He is
dead of hunger/thirst/ fear/tiredness’.
The description of the different instantiations of the
construction with an adjective uncovers different degrees
of fixedness and accordingly idiomaticity. In its
compositional use the construction is not idiomatic but
expresses a causal event, just like in the following
example with a non-color adjective:
(13) Fr. Il est triste de la perte de sa mère
Lit. ‘He is sad about the loss of his mother’.
The same prototypical meaning can be instantiated
with a color adjective, e.g.:
(14) Germ. Seine Nase ist schwarz vom Tabak (DWDS,
Kernkorpus)
Lit. ‘His nose is black from the tobacco’
(15) Germ. […] ihre Gesichter sind rot von der beißenden
Kälte (DWDS, Die Zeit, 03.06.2009, Nr. 7)
Lit. ‘[…] their faces are red from the biting cold’.
(13) Fr. Il est triste de la perte de sa mère
Lit. ‘He is sad about the loss of his mother’.
If the construction under study is not compositional,
its meaning is linked to the prototypical use by a part-of
relation, to use Goldberg’s terminology (1995), e.g.:
The above example:
(1) Fr. Pierre est rouge de colère
‘Peter is red with anger’
(1) Fr. Pierre est rouge de colère
‘Peter is red with anger’
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DOI: 10.3844/jssp.2015.289.303
(2) Germ. Maria ist gelb vor Eifersucht
‘Maria is yellow with jealousy’
(3) Fr. Il est fou d’amour
Lit. ‘He is crazy of love’.
De Knop (2013) describes two surveys conducted
with French-speaking Belgians and with German natives
aiming at testing the difference in the selection of the
color adjectives out of context on the one hand and in the
causal construction on the other. The investigation
unveils some interesting aspects. First, in the causal
construction French has a strong preference for the
green color but also for blue, German rather favors
yellow in the same construction. Secondly, the causal
construction has a strong impact on the meaning and
associations of the adjectives. If used out of context,
many associations related to the adjective are rather
positive, e.g. white is often associated with purity,
peace, quiet, cleanliness and so on. When used in the
causal construction the adjective often conveys a negative
meaning, e.g. Il est blanc de peur, lit. ‘He is white with
fear’ (see De Knop, 2013 for further details).
The different realizations of the same schematic
construction instantiate different degrees of fixedness
and idiomaticity. This leads us to classify our examples on a continuum between a prototypical compositional pole and another idiomatic non-compositional
pole. Between both poles we have the metonymical
use of the same construction.
Conceptual and Typological Differences between French and German
After the description of the variation in the different
instantiations of the construction with an adjective followed by a prepositional group7, we now want to turn to
the contrastive analysis of the examples as they are realized in the Romance language French – the mother
tongue of the learners (L1) – and the Germanic language German which corresponds to L2. Cognitive
Linguistics postulates a strong link between language
and cognition (Dirven and Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez,
2010). Langacker (1987: 5) goes one step further when
he claims that “Cognitive Grammar […] equates meaning with conceptualization” (Langacker, 1987: 5). Consequently, all linguistic meaning is conceptual in nature
and linguistic entities reflect underlying concepts. Interestingly, different speech communities do not conceptualize and categorize reality in the same way, they
construe events differently and often use different linguistic expressions for the same reality. According to
Ellis and Cadierno (2009: 122), “[c]onstructions are
conventionalized linguistic means for presenting different interpretations or construals of an event”. Consequently, differences between expressions in French and
German reflect differences in conceptualization. Let us
now look at the differences with the construction under
study in both languages.
Selection of the Preposition
In an article about “Emotions as cause and the cause
of emotions”, Dirven (1997) distinguishes seven
different causal prepositions in English for the
expression of causality, i.e. with, for, out of, from, in,
through and by. They all highlight different aspects of
causality, e.g. the “uncontrollable cause of a process”
(58) with the preposition with, the “cause of emotions
as a target” (70) which triggers at, or “the cause of
emotions as abstract motion on a surface” (72) for the
preposition about, to name just a few (see Dirven
1995; 1997 or Khoo et al., 2002 for more details). In
the same way, German has several prepositions for the
expression of causality, more specifically von, vor,
aus and wegen. French is different as it only has the
preposition de and à cause de. In the construction
under study the preposition selection is even more
limited in French which only uses de, while German
can select either von or vor:
(14) Germ. Seine Nase ist schwarz vom Tabak (DWDS,
Kernkorpus)
Lit. ‘His nose is black from the tobacco’
(15) Germ. […] ihre Gesichter sind rot von der
beißenden Kälte (DWDS, Die Zeit, 03.06.2009, Nr.
7)
Lit. ‘[…] their faces are red from the biting cold’
(16) Germ. Die Hände der Kinder waren blau vor
Kälte (DWDS, Kernkorpus)
Lit. ‘The hands of the children were blue from (the)
cold’
(2) Germ. Maria ist gelb vor Eifersucht
Lit. ‘Maria is yellow with jealousy’.
Selection of the Adjective
A contrastive study of the causal construction in
French and German brings to the fore that French and
German select different color adjectives. Whereas
German will speak of gelb (‘yellow’) in association with
the feeling of jealousy or envy, French will rather
associate the green color (vert) with the same emotion:
(1) a. Germ. Maria ist gelb vor Eifersucht
‘Maria is yellow with jealousy’
b. Fr. Maria est verte de jalousie
‘Maria is green with jealousy’.
In the French translation of these examples it is always the preposition de which is used:
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(14’) Fr. ‘Son nez était noir du 8 tabac’
(15’) Fr. ‘[…] leurs visages sont rouges du froid mordant’
(16’) Fr. ‘Les mains des enfants étaient bleues de froid’
(2’) Fr. ‘Maria est verte de jalousie’.
2004; Siemund, 2004; or Würstle, 1992). The notion of
syntheticity is a wide concept which covers not only agglutination or inflection, but also synthetic ways of expressions
like compounding (Siemund, 2004: 170). As we have seen
before, the causal construction with an adjective often
expresses an extreme state of excessiveness, especially
when it is used in a non-compositional way. For instance, in the above examples of phraseo-constructions,
it is not the literal meaning which is meant but much
more an extreme state:
The French preposition de is polysemous, it conveys
different meanings for which German uses different
prepositions. The German preposition von is mainly used
for external causes like the cold, tobacco, etc. It is always
used with the definite article. Vor is used in most
examples without an article, it often expresses an inherent
cause like a strong feeling for instance (see example 2).
The change of state, e.g. becoming blue or red in the face,
triggered by the cause happens non-intentionally. If the
change were controlled and taking place intentionally,
then one would have to use the preposition aus. No such
examples were found in the collection of examples as it is
hardly possible to change one’s face color intentionally.
For further details see Girdenienë (2006).
The difference in number and type of the
prepositions between French and German reflects
typological differences between Romance and Germanic
languages (see also Talmy, 2000). Germanic languages –
to which German belongs – favor the expression of
manner. This dimension pervades several levels of
lexicalization and is not restricted to expressions of
location and motion, as has been shown by De Knop and
Gallez (2013). The preposition diversity for the
expression of causality in German is a further illustration
of this manner dimension. The polysemy of the
construction is neutralized in German with this diversity,
which is not the case in French.
(3) Fr. Il est fou d’amour
Lit. ‘He is crazy of love’
= ‘He is very much in love’
(4) Fr. Anne est morte de faim
Lit. ‘Anne is dead of hunger’
= ‘Anne is very hungry’
(6) Fr. Elle était malade d’amour
Lit. ‘She was ill/sick of love’
= ‘She was very much in love’.
The expression of excessiveness has found some
attention in linguistic research, mostly under the term
‘intensification’ (see Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi,
1994; Kirschbaum, 2002; Miclea, 2010; Oebel, 2012;
Račienė, 2013; van Os, 1989; or Zeschel, 2012).
According to Kirschbaum (2002: 6-7) intensification
can be realized at different linguistic levels in German:
(i) at the morphological level, especially with
compounding as with Riesenfreude (‘giant pleasure’),
ultracool; (ii) at the syntactic level, e.g. Sein Auge ist
blau wie ein Veilchen (‘His eye is blue like a violet’) or
In der Nacht hatte es sehr gefroren (‘In the night it had
frozen a lot’); and finally, (iii) at the lexical level with
words which express an intensity, e.g. verheerend
(‘devastating’). Different languages privilege different
“intensification strategies” (Zeschel, 2012: 52), as has
been illustrated in the contrastive studies by Miclea
(2010), who focuses on adjectives expressing
intensification in German and Romanian, or by Račienė
(2013) who compares expressions of intensification
between German and Lithuanian. Zeschel (2012: 63)
offers a comparative approach of three constructions in
English and German in the framework of Construction
Grammar, namely ‘Intensifier + Noun’ (e.g. glowing
health), ‘Intensifier + Adjective’ (e.g. glowingly healthy
skin) and ‘Intensifier + with + Noun’ (e.g. glowing with
health). He limits his analysis to intensification
expressions from the conceptual domains of sound, light,
heat and smell. We will see hereunder that the
intensification expressions in our study concern other
domains. For further contrastive studies see Dressler and
Merlini Barbaresi (1994) or Oebel (2012).
Analytic vs. Synthetic Lexicalization Patterns
In the discussion about the entrenched nature of the
causal construction with a color adjective in Section 2,
the search for examples in both the French and the German corpora of the Sketchengine was already described
in detail. It could also be observed that more examples
with a color adjective could be found in the French corpus frWaC than in the German corpus deTenTen. In this
section we want to discuss the possible reasons for this
difference and present a more fine-grained analysis. To
start with, Table 1 presents the detailed results about the
number of hits of the causal construction with a color
adjective in both corpora.
The difference in frequency can be explained by the
favorite lexicalization patterns in both languages, i.e. by
typological differences. German as a Germanic language
privileges synthetic lexicalization patterns (Primus,
1997), whereas French as a Romance language is characterized by analyticity (see Haarmann, 2004; Hinrichs,
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Table 1. Frequency of causal constructions with a color term (De Knop, 2014)
Colour term
Number of hits in German corpus
Colour term
weiß
5
blanc
schwarz
10
noir
rot
8
rouge
grün
3
vert
blau
0
bleu
gelb
0
jaune
Total
26
Number of hits in French corpus
11
67
14
19
0
3
114
(18b) Germ. Er hat Todesangst
Lit. ‘He has death fear’
(19a) Fr. Il est mort de fatigue
Lit. ‘He is dead of tiredness’
(19b) Germ. Er ist todmüde
Lit. ‘He is death tired‘.
German as a synthetic language favors compounds
for the expression of intensification9: “Das
Intensivierungsphänomen durch Komposition ist in allen
germanischen Sprachen vertreten, im Deutschen
allerdings besonders stark“ (Račienė, 2013: 127). As
claimed by Zeschel (2012: 71) this is due to “a general
typological tendency towards complex word-formations
that continues to influence German”.
For instance, the literal translation of example (4)
into German is possible, but not in use, e.g. (4’) Anne
ist tot vor Hunger. In German this example can be
translated by a causal construction with a verb which
expresses the dying process, namely sterben in (4’’)
Anne stirbt vor Hunger. But alternatively, it is often
an expression with a so-called ‘augmentative
compound’ (Lohde, 2006: 64) which is favored, e.g.
(4’’’) Anne hat einen Bärenhunger/Riesenhunger, lit.
‘Anne has a bear hunger/giant hunger’ (= ‘Anne is
very hungry’). In a similar way, Germans will rather
speak of liebeskrank sein (lit. ‘to be love sick’) as a
translation for example (6). The French phraseoconstruction [X est mort de Y] as illustrated with the
above examples in Section 2, Il est mort de faim/de
soif/de peur/de fatigue, lit. ‘He is dead of
hunger/thirst/fear/tiredness’
instantiates
the
conceptual metaphor EXCESSIVENESS IS DEATH. The
corresponding German augmentative compounds
either conceptualize the same idea of death (noun
Tod/adjective tot) or alternatively the metaphor
EXCESSIVENESS IS GIANT with the first constituent of
the compound (Riesen):
Both constituents of the German compound are related to each other by a metaphor rather than by causality. The second constituent of the German compound
expresses the emotion.
Survey about the Different Lexicalization Patterns
in French and German
In order to confirm our hypothesis that German
privileges more synthetic ways of expression, whereas
French rather selects analytic lexicalization patterns
for the expression of excessiveness or intensification,
we started two surveys with French-speaking and
German natives. The French-speaking test group
consisted of 17 Belgian students of Romance
languages at the Université catholique de Louvain, the
group with the German natives was a mixed group of
4 students and 8 non-student adults. Both groups
received the same questionnaire in their mother
tongue asking for alternative ways of expressions, e.g.
‘How can you say that … someone is very hungry,
someone is very thirsty, someone is very unhappy,…’
(see Appendix I and II). Each questionnaire contained
10 questions. Several answers were possible for each
question. At the beginning of the survey it was
specified that there are no wrong answers. The
participants knew nothing about the purpose of the test.
(4a)
Fr. Anne est morte de faim
Lit. ‘Anne is dead of hunger’
(4b) Germ. Anne hat einen Riesenhunger
Lit. ‘Anne has a giant hunger’
(17a) Fr. Il est mort de soif
Lit. ‘He is dead of thirst’
(17b) Germ. Er hat einen Riesendurst
Lit. ‘He has a giant thirst’
(18a) Fr. Il est mort de peur
Lit. ‘He is dead of fear’
Results of the Survey
The test results confirm our expectations. It can
first be observed that the French-speaking group selected no compounds at all, but more varied ways of
expression than the German group. The most frequent
expressions for French speakers consist of an adjective followed by comme (‘as’) which introduces a
comparison with a following noun (7.6% of the answers), as illustrated in blanc comme un linge (lit.
295
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DOI: 10.3844/jssp.2015.289.303
‘white as (a) linen’), blanc comme une endive (lit.
‘white as an endive’), blanc comme un mort (lit.
‘white as a dead person’), pâle comme la mort (lit.
‘pale as (the) death’). Most of these expressions are
idiomatic in French and they belong to the phraseological ways of expressing that someone is very pale.
Even more idiomatic is the single example malheureux comme les pierres (lit. ‘unhappy like the stones’)
for the idea of being very unhappy. The Frenchspeaking group also opted for causal constructions
with a verb (6.8%), e.g. mourir/crever de faim (lit. ‘to
die of hunger’) or mourir/crever de soif (lit. ‘to die of
thirst’). Only 4.7% of the answers corresponded to the
causal construction with an adjective, for instance vert
de peur/de jalousie (lit. ‘green with fear/with jealousy’), rouge de colère (lit. ‘red with anger’). In 3% of
the cases we have a nominal group consisting of a noun
further determined by another noun, e.g. avoir une faim
de loup (lit. ‘to have a hunger of wolf’) or un froid de
canard (lit. ‘a cold of duck’). As a last alternative, we
find a noun with an attributive adjective (2.1%) as illustrated by une peur bleue (lit. ‘a blue fear’).
The German group produced mainly compounds
(32%), in only 3 cases (0.01%) also a causal construction with an adjective, e.g. … ist gelb vor Neid (‘…is
yellow with envy’). The causal construction with a
verb, as exemplified here above, for example (4) Anne
stirbt vor Hunger, is hardly represented (0.03%).
Among the compounds, we can further differentiate
between nouns and adjectives, e.g. einen Bärenhunger
haben (lit. ‘to have a bear hunger’) or todunglücklich
sein (lit. ‘to be death unhappy’). Most examples are
nominal, e.g. Mordshunger haben (lit. ‘to have crime
hunger’), Riesenangst haben (lit. ‘to have giant fear’),
Bleichgesicht sein (lit. ‘to be a pale face’), Angsthase
sein (lit. ‘to be fear hare’), Todesangst haben (lit. ‘to
have death fear’). Most of the nominal compounds are
idiomatic phraseologisms, their first constituent is
often used to build other compounds, e.g. Mordshunger (lit. ‘crime hunger’), Mordsangst (lit. ‘crime fear’);
or Riesendurst (lit. ‘giant thirst’), Riesenhunger
(‘giant hunger’). Among the compound examples 38%
are adjectives which sometimes build whole series.
This pertains to expressions for extreme coldness, e.g.
todeskalt (lit. ‘death cold’), eiskalt (lit. ‘ice cold’),
mega kalt (lit. ‚mega cold‘), arschkalt (lit. ‘ass cold’),
bitterkalt (lit. ‘bitter cold’), hundekalt (lit. ‘dog cold’)
and lauskalt (lit. ‘louse cold’). Some of the adjectival
examples are directly derived from the nominal compounds, for instance mordshungrig (lit. ‘crime
hungry’), todesängstlich (lit. ‘death fearful’),
heißhungrig (lit. ‘hot hungry’). German linguists use
the term ‘Zusammenbildungen’ for such examples
(see among others Wolf, 2002: 77). Table 2 hereunder
recapitulates the results for both groups. To sum up,
French speakers use a variety of lexicalization patterns for the expression of excessiveness or intensification, showing no preference for one type of pattern,
whereas Germans rather privilege compounds. Let us
now see how to deal with these differences from a
pedagogical point of view.
Pedagogical Issues
When one learns a foreign language, one soon realizes that there are differences in the lexicalization
patterns and that “[t]here are very few one-to-one
correspondences between languages” (Littlemore,
2009: 4). In Cognitive Linguistics terms, language
reflects underlying conceptualizations and categories
and as a consequence differences in language reflect
differences at the conceptualization and categorization
level. Pavlenko (2005: 446) distinguishes seven possible patterns between verbal and conceptual performance with bilinguals. In the first pattern (i), both L1
and L2 conceptual representations coexist. This is
particularly the case with beginning learners. But it is
especially the second pattern (ii), namely an “L1based conceptual transfer” (Pavlenko, 2005: 446), i.e.
“the L1-based conceptual system guiding L2 language
learning and use, at least in the beginning and intermediate
stages of L2 acquisition” (Pavlenko, 2005: 438) which
creates a kind of “obstacle” (Boers et al., 2010: 5) for the
proper learning of the foreign categories. The other patterns described by Pavlenko are less relevant for our
study, therefore we simply refer to Pavlenko (2005: 446)
for a description of more categories.
The difficulties encountered by French-speaking
learners of German with the causal construction with
an adjective can be different in nature. Either they are
conceptual, i.e. they depend on the different conceptualizations in French and in German, whereby the L1based conceptual system (in this case French) is predominant and transferred onto the categories of German-L2 (compare Pavlenko, 2005: 446). As outlined
before in Section 3.1, French and German speakers
sometimes select different adjectives in the causal
construction, e.g. yellow in German vs. green in
French for the same emotion of jealousy:
(2) a. Germ. Maria ist gelb vor Eifersucht
Lit. ‘Maria is yellow with jealousy’
b. Fr. Maria est verte de jalousie
Lit. ‘Maria is green with jealousy’.
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DOI: 10.3844/jssp.2015.289.303
Table 2. Results of the surveys by the French-speaking and German groups
French-speaking group
Compound
/
Causal construction with a verb
6.8%
Causal construction with an adjective
4.7%
Nominal group + another noun
3%
Adjective as noun
7.6%
Noun/Verb + adjective
2.1%
A further challenge for learners of German is the
right selection of the causal preposition in the causal
construction (see also Section 3.2.). German focuses
on the manner dimension and consequently has a variety of causal prepositions which means that the
learner has to identify the conceptualization which
motivates the selection of the right preposition: is it an
external (which would motivate the use of von) or an
intrinsic cause (for the selection of vor). Difficulties
are particularly prominent for learners of languages
which use one and the same polysemous preposition
in the causal construction, as French does with the
preposition de. Littlemore (2009: 29) already underlined the problem of the diverging number of conceptual categories between L1 and L2. She observes that
“[t]hings become even more difficult for language
learners when a concept that is divided into two broad
categories in their own language is divided into, say,
three categories in the target language” (2009: 29). In
our case it is one single prepositional category in
French-L1 against three categories in German-L2.
A further difficulty results from the “typological distance” (Athanasopoulos, 2009: 93) between German and
French and especially from the favorite lexicalization
patterns in both languages for the same concept. This is a
linguistic difference between both languages (see Section 3.3). French-speaking learners have to realize that
German is a synthetic language and that it privileges
synthetic ways of expression with compounds. This
applies more specifically to expressions of excessiveness
and intensification for which French has a whole variety
of analytic lexicalization possibilities, among others
causal constructions with an adjective. The learning
problem is not a linguistic one as German also has causal
constructions with an adjective to express the same
meaning as in French. But the challenge for learners of
German resides in the recognition of the privileged ways
of expression for causality or an extreme emotional or
physical state. Accordingly, learning a foreign language
means to learn to re-orientate one’s attention to different
conceptual or linguistic aspects in the foreign language.
But, as claimed by Littlemore (2009: 29), “[…] the cate-
German-speaking group
32%
0.03%
0.01%
/
/
0.02%
gorization systems that we build up due to our L1 cause
us to form habits that are hard to break when we encounter a different language with different categorization
systems”. In the following section we will propose some
strategies to ‘break such habits’ and to facilitate the
learning of the causal construction with an adjective with
all its specific dimensions.
Teaching Strategies
The previous sections aimed at describing the
syntactic and semantic variation in the causal
construction with an adjective in a contrastive study
between French and German. Learners of German will
not be aware of this variation which means that the
first didactic step should consist in focusing on this
variation and on the differences between both
languages. The foreign learner has to “reconstruct” the
second language (Ellis and Cadierno, 2009: 124), this
“involves learning a new set of conventionalized
form-meaning mappings, that is, acquiring the specific
linguistic means used by the native speakers of the
target-language to construe given events and
situations” (Ellis and Cadierno, 2009: 125). Following
Goldstone and Steyvers (2001), Roberson (2005: 66)
suggests that “a critical component on any category
learning is increased selective attentional weighting of
salient dimensions”. This reminds of Schmidt’s (1990 and
2001) “noticing hypothesis”. Athanasopoulos (2009:
92) advocates a “cognitive restructuring in the mind
of bilinguals”, which in the examples under study
means to not only spend time on the “categorical
divisions”, but also on the linguistic habits in the
foreign language. Robinson and Ellis (2008) advocate
a “rethinking for speaking”, in order to counteract the
biases due to L1-categories and lexicalization
patterns. We are now going to describe more
concretely how this can be achieved.
Chunks
Ellis and Cadierno (2009: 114) claim that “much
of communication makes use of fixed expressions
memorized as formulaic chunks”. Phraseological units
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DOI: 10.3844/jssp.2015.289.303
pervade communication, either in the form of
collocations, multi-word sequences, holophrases,
phrasemes, idioms and so on (Wulff, 2012). This
assumption offers a good starting point for a teaching
methodology based on chunks or holophrases:
“[L]anguage acquisition is the learning of an
inventory of patterns as arrangements of words with
their associated structural meanings.” (Ellis and
Cadierno, 2009: 114) Characterized by the “idiom
principle” (Ellis and Cadierno, 2009: 113), phraseoconstructions as fixed patterns with some open slots
build an ideal field to practice such chunks. The
frequency dimension should not be neglected, which
means that it is to be recommended to draw the
learner’s attention to German favorite lexicalization
patterns from the beginning of the learning process.
The variation in the lexicalization patterns can be
highlighted as well.
Following the principle of form-meaning mapping
and in order to draw the learner’s attention to
alternative ways of expression, we will advocate a
teaching
methodology
which
opts
for
an
onomasiological procedure by starting from the
question of how extreme or excessive states can be
expressed in both French and German. This
methodology offers the advantage to focus first on the
similarities between German and French as both
languages use the same causal construction with an
adjective. But it also allows to stress the differences
between both languages with the alternative
augmentative compounds in German for the
expression of excessiveness. One could use the
different examples of the survey in Appendix I and II.
For instance, how can one express that one is very
hungry, very thirsty, is feeling very cold, etc.
The conceptual differences which become obvious
with the selection of the adjective in the causal
construction can be illustrated with some cloze
exercises asking for different adjectives in the same
causal construction. This is in line with the definition
of phraseo-constructions as partly fixed structures, but
in which some slots have to be filled (Dobrovol’skij,
2011: 114). The teacher can ask which adjective is
possible in a phraseo-construction such as German
Peter ist … vor … or French Marie est … de … (‘Peter
is … of/from …’/ ‘Maria is … of/from…’). This is a
way to “introduce the students to controlled variation
in these basic phrases with the help of simple
substitution drills, which would demonstrate that the
chunks learnt previously were not invariable routines,
but were instead patterns with open slots” (Nattinger
and DeCarrico, 1992: 117). But many other exercise
types are possible. For the teaching of chunks,
Handwerker and Madlener (2006) and Handwerker
(2008) suggest to work with film sequences and
animations, they propose a three-step procedure: (i)
presentation of film sequences and animations with a
large offer of chunks; (ii) a reduced and simplified
series of chunks (without particles, adjuncts, …) are
presented in parallel in a photo series that can be used
to check the use or meaning of the chunk; and (iii)
concrete explanations of the specific chunk in (ii).
This three-step procedure should be accompanied by
many exercises. There is no limit to teachers’
creativity.
Conceptual Metonymy and Metaphor
As we saw in detail in Section 2, causal constructions with an adjective are often used to express excessive emotional states, be it literally, metonymically
or metaphorically. It is the ‘fluid rise’ metonymy for a
specific state or emotion which plays a major role in
the phraseo-constructions. This metonymy is strongly
linked to the conceptual metaphors EMOTION IS A
NATURAL PHYSICAL FORCE and ANGER IS THE HEAT OF
A FLUID IN A CONTAINER (Barcelona, 2001), as realized in the following instantiations:
(1) Fr. Pierre est rouge de colère
‘Peter is red with anger’
(2) Germ. Maria ist gelb vor Eifersucht
‘Maria is yellow with jealousy’.
In these examples, it is the head which is perceived
as being a container and where the color change is
taking place.
Because this metonymy and these metaphors exist
in both French and German, the teacher can start from
the similarities between both languages, showing
examples of a similar realization of both conceptual
metonymy and metaphor in both languages. Then s/he
can point to the differences between both languages
(see also Barcelona 2001: 137ff) and especially to the
alternative ways in German for the expression of excessiveness. This is particularly clear in the following
contrastive examples which instantiate the conceptual
metaphor EXCESSIVENESS IS DEATH in:
(18) a. Fr. Il est mort de peur
Lit. ‘He is dead of fear’
b. Germ. Er hat Todesangst
Lit. ‘He has death fear’
(19) a. Fr. Il est mort de fatigue
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DOI: 10.3844/jssp.2015.289.303
An adequate teaching methodology for the type of
examples under discussion should address the issues
of chunking and conceptual metonymy and metaphor.
These are favorite concepts of Cognitive Linguistics
which offers explanations that “draw on learners’
everyday real world experience by tapping into an
intuitive reservoir of knowledge that facilitates an
understanding of the systematic relationships among
the units of language” (Tyler, 2012: 18). In this sense,
we hope to have shown a few avenues to foster language teaching efficiency.
Lit. ‘He is dead of tiredness’
b. Germ. Er ist todmüde
Lit. ‘He is death tired‘.
Here are examples for the other metaphor EXCESSIe.g.
VENESS IS GIANT,
(4)
a. Fr. Anne est morte de faim
Lit. ‘Anne is dead of hunger’
b. Germ. Anne hat einen Riesenhunger
Lit. ‘Anne has a giant hunger’
(17) a. Fr. Il est mort de soif
Lit. ‘He is dead of thirst’
b. Germ. Er hat einen Riesendurst
Lit. ‘He has a giant thirst’.
Acknowledgements and Notes
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for
the constructive comments and suggestions on a former version.
1
We will present some figures in the next section to
sustain the entrenchment hypothesis advocated in this
paper.
2
The SketchEngine is a “corpus query system incorporating word sketches, one-page, automatic, corpusderived summary of a word’s grammatical and collocational behaviour […] which gives access to large corpora
for
42
languages”
(http://www.SketchEngine.co.uk/?page=Website/Sketch
Engine).
3
We will add the source only for the examples which
have been found in the corpora; when no source is indicated, the example belongs to a list of examples collected by the author from everyday speech.
4
In Section 3 we will deal in detail with the possible
prepositions in French and German.
5
We focused our search on causal structures with a color
adjective for methodological reasons. Because of their
limited number, it is easy to enter a color adjective and
get the hits.
6
The color in the face will be rather perceived as yellowish, bluish, whitish, greenish,…, still it is the term for
the plain color which is used in the construction.
7
The subject can be different. But one could not replace
Y, i.e. bonheur, by another object.
8
We could even have extended this description to
some more realizations of a similar construction
which contains the same syntactic elements as the
construction under study but without conveying a
causal meaning, e.g. Fr. Pierre est sûr de sa sœur, lit.
‘Peter is sure of his sister’ (= ‘Peter can rely on his
sister’) or Fr. Elle est très belle de visage (Salles,
1998: 122), lit. ‘She is very pretty of the face’ (= ‘She
has a pretty face’). As these examples do not express
any causality or excessiveness, we do not want to deal
As we can realize, foreign language teaching cannot
do without conceptual metaphor or metonymy.
Conclusion
The present study of causal constructions with an
adjective has dealt with the large variation in French
and German and from a contrastive perspective with
the differences between these two languages and the
difficulties encountered by French-speaking learners
of German. Because of their form-meaning mapping,
their entrenchment and their phraseological character,
Construction Grammar enriched by phraseological
aspects offers an adequate model to describe the examples of causal constructions with an adjective. This
approach has to be extended to language-specific
lexicalization patterns to explain why German prefers
compounding for the expression of excessiveness.
This assumption was checked with a survey conducted
with natives of German and French aiming at defining
the favorite lexicalization patterns in both languages.
The results confirmed our hypothesis that German as a
synthetic language privileges compounds, whereas
French as an analytic language uses varied syntactic
structures. But some reservations have to be expressed
about the survey results:
•
•
The number of participants was rather limited (17 in
French and 12 in German)
Both test groups had different profiles: The Belgian
group consisted only of students, whereas the German group was mixed, with both students and older
adults.
In spite of these biases, we could recognize some relevant tendencies which will have to be further tested
with larger groups.
299
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DOI: 10.3844/jssp.2015.289.303
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(2005) and Salles (1998) for a detailed description.
9
Du is a contracted form which compounds the preposition de (‘of’) + the definite article le (‘the’).
10
It is not the aim of this article to list and discuss all
the intensification strategies that are possible in German. Much more do we want to present some tendencies and in a contrastive perspective try to find an
explanation for the smaller amount of examples of
causal constructions with a color adjective in the
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Appendix I: French survey
Votre date de naissance …………………………………
Donnez des expressions alternatives (il n’y a pas de mauvaise réponse !)
Comment peut-on dire en français
1.
que quelqu’un a fort faim ……………………………………………………………
2.
que quelqu’un a fort froid……………………………………………………………
3.
que quelqu’un est très malheureux……………………………………………………………
4.
que quelqu’un a fort peur……………………………………………………………
5.
que quelqu’un a beaucoup de succès……………………………………………………………
6.
que quelqu’un est fort pâle……………………………………………………………
7.
que quelqu’un est très jaloux……………………………………………………………
8.
que quelqu’un a de fortes craintes……………………………………………………………
9.
que quelqu’un est fort en colère……………………………………………………………
10.
que quelqu’un a fort soif ……………………………………………………………
Appendix II: German survey
Ihr Geburtstag …………...………………………………
Geben Sie alternative Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten (Es gibt keine falsche Antwort!)
Wie kann man noch auf Deutsch sagen,
302
Sabine De Knop / Journal of Social Sciences 2015, 11 (3): 289.303
DOI: 10.3844/jssp.2015.289.303
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
dass jemand sehr großen Hunger hat ……………………………………………………………
dass jemandem sehr kalt ist……………………………………………………………
dass jemand sehr unglücklich ist……………………………………………………………
dass jemand große Angst hat……………………………………………………………
dass jemand viel Erfolg hat……………………………………………………………
dass jemand sehr blass ist……………………………………………………………
dass jemand sehr neidisch ist………………………………………………………
dass jemand sich sehr fürchtet……………………………………………………………
dass jemand sehr wütend ist……………………………………………………………
dass jemand sehr großen Durst hat……………………………………………………………
303